I think Arj, that that is a separate issue. I also think that if we were successful in attracting more teams that a ladder would be of even greater use in that case as Jewbear said. A ladder would quickly enable new teams to find their skill level and play worth while games that both sides would hopefully enjoy. Being dropped into a group/division where no one is really seeded properly, or worse, entering a tournament just to get smashed by every other team that has been playing for much longer than they have is hardly a good way to encourage community growth.
The fundamental issue I think is that barring the top teams who everyone could have a pretty good stab at say a top 5, it is difficult to rank anyone bellow that based on their cup performance or even their league performances. If leagues were ran continuously it might be a different story as the divisions would eventually become worth something, but no one can really argue that Original Gorges for example should have been in division 3 last season.
If you are a mid or low tier team, you really have very little idea of who you should be playing. If you are a Godar, Saunamen, Snails, Miau, Nexzil, it is obvious who you should practice against. Further more, because mid to low tier teams have a lot to improve upon, they will often make big jumps in relative skill, meaning they can go from a good practice partner to a pointless exercise in frustration over a reasonably short period. The slow pace of the leagues and tournaments that are pointless for the mid to lower tier do a poor job of reflecting these changes.
The problem with open ladders is that the teams have to want to play in them. In my experience the better teams do not want to play in the ladders for the very fact that anyone can challenge them, there will be many games where the games provide no challenge, thus no real chance to practice or improve for the higher teams.
This leads them to just ignore the ladders and stick to the league seasons. If this were to happen should an open ladder be implemented then it won't really give the lower teams a chance to play the better skilled teams.
It happened in CS 1.6 in the early years in the UK. Enemy Down ran an open ladder that was very active to be fair and once you hit the number 1 position in the ladder all glory was rained down upon you, or so you thought. Then you discovered the leagues such as CSGN and theSGL and realised that the skill gap between a lot of the teams that played in the leagues was huge compared to the teams you were playing in the ladder.
I am not saying this will necessarily happen if it were to be implemented as I can't speak for all the teams but this is just my view on it and I expect many of the high seed teams will just decide not to play in it.
Of course it is still good for all the teams that do want to play in it and perhaps I am wrong and some of the high seed teams will play. I am not sure how it will work in terms of seeding for the teams that do not want to play in the ladder unless of course it is the only way for teams to be seeded in future, in which case it would be silly not to play in it.
I was thinking of a solution to increase activity on mid/lower skilled teams. Come to think of it, the ladder could be an option, if:
1) You exclude top 8/10/16 teams from participating
2) Have an admin actively encourage teams to play matches (don't just leave it hanging, people are lazy)
3) Add an incentive to play. Like a very nice price for top 2 at predetermined enddate.
This could be something UWE would like to promote and put some money in. It encourages new players and teams to join, and it encouraged the mid/lower skilled teams to play actively.
If you don't want to play a team 8 ranks below you, don't play it/don't challenge them.
If you want to play a team 8 ranks below you for easy points, play it/challenge them.
If you don't want to play a team 8 ranks above you, don't play it/don't challenge them.
If you want to play a team 8 ranks above you, play it/challenge them.
If you don't want to play against a team 1 rank above/below you, decline the challenge or don't challenge them but your team won't go very far and the other teams will challenge each other and move past you.
There is the ability to say "No this won't be fun for us, it'll be a stomp (either way)" without making the ladder stagnant.
Even if the top team declines all challenges, if the 2nd team challenges/accepts challenges from the other teams, they will take no. 1
Edit: I should add that teams should respect each other in the sense that the top team really might not find it fun to play against the bottom team and so if they decline, the bottom team shouldn't go into a hissy fit that they can't experience playing the top players. After all, without the ladder, they wouldn't have been able to play the top team anyway.
And if the top teams don't participate in the ladder because of "prestige" or whatever, then that's not something we can stop. Perhaps if one of the top 3 joins, it might be an incentive for the others to join and compete with each other for the long time No 1. spot.
The seasons are long and the ladder will be a great way to consistently view who is number 1 at the time.
Imagine a football league with champions league on the side.
Wob, you miss my point that I use the ladder to activate activity for med/low teams, and new players/teams.
Top teams don't need a 'tool' to encourage or keep activity.
The incentive for the med/lower teams to be able to win something, and the overview of enemies and strengths is a solution to the problems that started in this thread.
You could make a seperate ladder for US without excluding top teams, since there is a decent base of med teams and a small base of top teams.
Putting higher teams in the EU ladder will kill it. The top teams don't care for it, and the med/lower teams will lose interest when so many teams are above them.
If you really want a ladder (for Duplex), make an extra ladder for top teams.
We really need to invest in new players and teams for the community to grow, and this seems like a way to do it.
How are teams ever going to climb the ladder in a game when they are constantly playing lower seeded teams? Doesn't make any sense to me...
The whole point of a ladder system is risk and reward. Sure a top team can play a lower team, if they win they do not gain much, but if they lose a lot of points are deducted.
The divisions should be what distinguishes skill gaps between teams, not a ladder system.
Separating and making divisions in a ladder is not something that would work out well, it would just create more scrim dodging.
Every now and then in a scrim it feels rewarding as a lower skilled team to take a round off of a higher skilled team...having that displayed publicly boosts moral for the team as well.
Arj... it looks like you've missed my point and so we're both talking past each other.
So you want to encourage med/low teams to play. That's what seasons are for.
The ladder helps give a proper perspective of ranking and long term, 24/7 activity because ladders don't end.
I'm not sure but I think winning a ladder but only because the top 8 teams aren't in it wouldn't be that satisfying. I think trying to overtake that 8th spot team would be. This is why I think my point is better than yours and this is the point you should try to dispute to convince me about your idea.
I also think that having everyone in the ladder and the ability to decline challenges is fine for reasons I stated a few posts above.
Your idea is essentially a never ending ENSL season. Look at division 2 in season 2. Hard.day and Radical stomping every other team. You want to have that in a ladder system where no one will challenge them and they won't be able to challenge anyone else?
There needs to be competition between teams. You might say remove radical and hard.day but then you're slimming down the teams even further and further and you still might end up with 1 teams stomping. With my system you end up having Snails/Godar/Sauna all competing for that No. 1 and it might switch around to much and so frequently with many many games being casted between those 3 every week.
It might get boring if 1 team continues to stomp, but looking at the Sauna-Godar games, I'd love to see them battle each week to see who has become that tiny edge better.
This also means that by including every team, every team will have a competitive partner or someone to leap over. I don't see one of godar/sauna/snails holding no. 1 forever and I dont think any team would hold the bottom rank forever.
One issue with any ladder system I see is that the most active teams will probably be higher rated because they can get more games in and get more points. Maybe a limit of 5 games a week or something to keep teams running away with points.
Wob, the points don't have to grow to infinity, there could be points deduction over time, you can have less points given/ more deducted if there is already big point (skill) differenece, there are methods/ algorithms that deal with points distribution, like Elo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system).
The algorithms and all can be sorted out once we establish that a ladder system is simply the best :P
And if the admins are willing to try it out or someone with the skills and time can volunteer and help implement the ladder to take the work load off of the admins.
We have a league admin (Swalk), and I imagine if someone put in the time to make the ladder, we'd have (need) a ladder admin.
Wob, you have missed the fact that top teams don't want to play in a ladder. Therefor all your good arguments are not very relevant. I do feel it could work if we all were willing to try.
This however, does not solve the most important goal in my comments; attracting new players and new teams. If a ladder is not the solution.. how do we attract these new players? Does anyone have any ideas?
I think Fana's statement covers alot of div 1 players, sorry Wob.
I would love for the ladder system to be newbie/rookie friendly and welcome new players and farm teams to the community and maybe get Master Bitey to open his Dojo for them. Distribute some sort of tshirt price or temp server for a team that holds X weeks, I dunno, but there could be potential to have it as a gateway for new teams to eventually go into seasonal play.
Why does it matter if some of the top teams don't want to enter?
If 20 of 30 teams want to enter, keeping the whole community more active all the time I don't see why its a bad thing?
The ladder, like it or not, has been one of the only discussions that's actually gone on in the last 3-4 weeks on this forum - at least showing that there is some interest in it.
Is there any way of polling leaders to see who would/wouldn't be interested etc?
If the ENSL just point blank refuse to do it then let us know and everyone can move on.
My point wasn't that they don't want to enter, it's that there should be more to it than just another competetion/cup imo, something that could bring more fresh players in or have the potential to do so, as Arj stated.
Pretty sure ENSL can pull it off, but right now during the summer, I haven't seen the amount of admin activity that would be needed to get this rolling. That's one of the reasons I think we need another admin or someone in charge of it.
You could sort all the algorithms and details for the ladder, but you'd still need it to be either implemented in a new website for ENSL or use the old system Jirki was talking about, that's already on this site, and put in the code for all the fixes. Easier said than done ^^
I'm hopeful though, that the admins that are able to and the community members, try and come together to create it. Could be flip or flop.
It is already too complicated for teams to enter a match schedule or read rules, so a website system to challenge teams is deemed to fail.
Solution could be to have a plugin on servers which does everything automatically. If 2 teams go in and enter something like
/ladder_ready
they could start a ranked match with the plugin recording results, player ids etc automatically and put results into a database from NSL. The rankings (I'd also like an ELO system) is something you can always do after. But a plugin like this would be needed firsst. Teams would have to organize matches themselves like they do with PCWs. And if both agree, they just have to enter /ladder_ready instead of /ready to have it count.
On the same time would be nice to generally have a NSL plugin, NS2stats is nice but way overloaded and hard to maintain (no one wants to do it anymore really).
So if anyone would step up and is able to code such a plugin, I'm all ears for a try.
Couldn't it just be a website? You challenge another team, they accept, you agree on a time and place, report scores, winner moves up, loser goes down?
I mean it's just a ladder, there's no money involved or anything. Even if there ends up being some fuckery afoot, it wouldn't really matter would it?
I think the people who are pro-ladder system are more interested in something that allows them to play competitively more often than they currently are, and provides some incentive for teams with lower seeds to play teams with higher seeds. There is very little cheating/fuckery that goes on in NS2 matches as far as I can tell, and it's not like there wouldn't be anyone watching... more often than not we have trouble getting all our players into the server because there are so many spectators.
@Kaneh - Good idea apart from you might find teams not challenging/accepting challenges from No. 1 (It's a possibility) and so they suffer
@Arj - So if SOME of the top teams don't want to participate, they don't have to. But the ones that do can. Making requirements and restrictions to "balance" the ladder is essentially making the ladder a never ending ENSL divisional season.
I'd want duplex to play in the ladder because all competition is good competition and it's much more flexible, and available than just ENSL seasons (WITH WHICH IT CAN RUN ALONG SIDE OF).
Players who want to join the competitive scene won't be put off by a the presence of a ladder and activity associated with it. They'd probably be pulled in because of it!
Heck, teams are for the most part, desperate to join and progress through the ensl seasons so they can call themselves a "Div 1" team and I think there is more prestige in the seasons because of this status than the ladder. But having a ladder available on the side so you can play MORE competitive games is a good thing.
The best way to attract new players is simply advertisement of the competitive scene. They see the game, aware of how to join in, and think "Oh that looks fun, I'll try it".
@b1 - So some of the players from the top teams don't want to participate in the ladder. Ok. Sure. Don't. This isn't a season like thing when you HAVE to join for any kind of competition. The ladder is probably more casual than the seasons but it does provide a source of competition.
Using a reward system like t-shirts and money is a bad way for a community this small to increase the size of the scene because new players and teams who join looking for the money will fade out when the money and t-shirts are removed from future competitions (Unless some generous person is willing to fund prizes for every competition, at each individual level because apparently we want to separate everyone from everyone :S :S :S). People who want to play competitively will do so out of their own willingness if given the opportunity.
The thing about a ladder is that it should bring more players in. It isn't just another season/cup. It's a long term ladder which doesn't reset and isn't a spontaneous creation. People will look to it as a steady source of competition with some sort of meaning to it (Your team's rank). Sure it won't be as prestigous as the seasons but the rank will have meaning to it. Radical and Quaxy fighting it out for No. 1 and No. 2 (if the other teams don't want to join) will provide those teams entertainment and competition! Likewise any team at any ranking. Halfway through a season though, it's pretty apparent who is going to be No. 1 and No. 2 and teams fold because of it. Where's the massive incentive to finish 4th instead of 5th. Especially when (Rumour has it) that because so many teams folded, the division sizes are getting smaller so the top teams in div 2 won't actually move up into div 1.
@Blind - It wouldn't be difficult to enter a match schedule when this is purely 100% flexible. There's no deadline, there's no rescheduling needed, it's simply
"Wanna play 1800 on thursday for the ladder?"
"Nah friday would be good"
"Ok we can't do friday"
"Damn that's a shame, maybe another time"
*2 weeks later*
"So about that ladder match?"
"Sure we can do it Monday at 2100"
"Nice. See you there."
Put up schedule on website.
Accepted by other team.
[OPTIONAL]Caster notices it and says "You mind if I stream?"
It can be difficult when you're given 1 week to reschedule 3 group stage games in to suit 12 people.
There aren't really any rules that can be broken which can be fixed using a plugin. The only rules which would be abused would be mercs but then you just have a comments page on team profiles where people can say "This team used denied mercs / fake nicks, avoid like the plague" and it becomes a reputation based thing which in this small community means a lot.
You can not really have material rewards for a ladder. After all, the rankings in theory change on a weekly basis so that would be a lot of prizes. A better way to do it (which has been mentioned before) would be to use the NS2 player badges mod and have some appropriate gold/silver/bronze badge. This could be updated quite quickly and presumably even automated eventually which would be nice.
